The Future of Art

I'm Joe McCormick. So in our last podcast we talked about three D printing and art, and I thought in this podcast we should back out a little bit and look more generally at the relationship between technology and art, because that's something that isn't always totally intuitive to people, and in fact, I think some people kind of don't like it, right they have this low tech view of

what art should be. Oh sure, In fact, I think we could probably posit that angry Joe might say that technology shouldn't be involved in art at all, but it should be the way that it has always been, that it should never be produced any differently, right, sure, well, Lauren's talking about the angry Joe from the last podcast, the guy who wants things to be how they've always been. Right.

There would resist anything beyond say, painting and sculpture. That is art, that is all art is, and only if it is done in the traditional way, whatever school of art you happen to follow, that is all that can be allowed into art with a capital A. Well, I want to tell y'all story please. Kind of interesting to me about an event in the history of art. Have you ever seen a painting called Nude descending a Staircase Number two by Duchamp? Okay, so it was Marcel Duchamp's painting,

and it's how would you describe it? Um? I would describe it as being kind of this, uh, you know, it's if you don't know what the title of the painting is, you don't know what you're looking at. Yeah, I think. But once you know the title, if you're standing at the right distance, you can totally see what was trying to be captured, which is this idea of movement. Right, You've got these shapes and colors and lines that are

they're evocative of someone walking across the frame. Yeah, it's it's vaguely earth toned throughout in varying shades, and then it's got these intersecting lines and strange shapes. It's it's very abstract. Um. But when you attached the title to it, Yeah, you can definitely see the blur of motion in it, right, something that looks like someone passing through the darkness. So

that's got universal acclaim, right, No, actually it didn't. It was very divisive when it came out, so yeah, sorry, guys. In nineteen thirteen, there was an art show in New

York called the Armory Show. And this is kind of a famous event in in Transatlantic art history because what was going on at the Armory Show is a lot of the European paintings were being showed off to an American audience, and so there were offering views about a lot of the different things at the show, but Nude Descending a Staircase Number two by Duchamp was one of the most divisive. It got some very negative reactions from people. One critic said that it looked like, quote, an explosion

in a shingle factory. Um. Teddy Roosevelt actually, like the former president, Teddy Roosevelt panned it. He compared the painting to a rug that he had hanging up in his bathroom. Unfavorably, Yeah, unfavorably. He said that the rug was a better piece of art, better representation of an as he called it, I think a nude man going down the stairs, going descending a ladder or something like that. He also talked about going up a ladder a clothed man going oh yeah, yeah, yeah,

okay yeah. Um. So a lot of people were just like, what is this. I don't like it. I don't like the way it looks. It doesn't look like a nude descending a staircase. It's no good. Yeah. Um. Now it is widely considered a very important and meaningful work of art that's highly respected by a lot of people. What happened, Well, I mean, one thing is it has sort of faded to the background now and it's sort of part of it's the old school now, and there's plenty of new

things for people to say that's not art, right. Sure, And also we can kind of see in a perspective of time where it fits. It's easier once we get a little bit removed from the current moment, I think. Sure. And it wasn't just that people were rejecting abstract art in general. They weren't necessarily like there were abstract art schools that didn't like this painting because it didn't fit

what they thought that, you know, the school should be. Uh. But in any case, I wanted to talk about something that I found interesting about this painting, which is that it was actually inspired by something that came before it, not necessarily something artistic, but something technological. And what would that be the advent of early film chrono photography, Uh,

the move pictures. So the early films people made, and like the decades that came before this, we're not narratives yet usually all right, there were just short little scenes like a horse running, or like a naked person coming down a flight of stairs. And still that Tuesday morning at my house, yess new Jonathan descending a staircase number two was not quite as big a hit as regular

nude descending a staircase. But yeah, so what was going on in this painting was that Duchamp was trying to capture the motion that was available in this new form of art that you know, the technological form, the moving film, how the motion appeared on the screen. There could he put it in a frame And that's sort of what

he did, kind of did. Yeah, and again once you you know, we being more familiar with film as a medium, can sort of see what he was trying to capture a little more easily, I think than the audience that saw it way back when. I think this is a great example of the positive relationship between technology and art and sort of a rebuke to those people who say, no, art is old school, it should be low tech. It's you know, chisel or paint brush, and and that's it there.

I think that is wrong. I think that there is a positive feedback loop of inspiration between technology and art. They feed off of each other, they inspire each other, and that this is a great example that they make each other possible in certain ways. I mean, we should all also keep in mind that without materials science throughout the ages, we would certainly not have the colors of

paints that we do today, oh totally. For for for example, chemistry, or by the time that we started getting into the actual manufacture of man made solvents or basses or fillers or additives or pigments, the creation of plastics hugely drove new directions in the painting artistic industry. And and also just pure mechanical or industrial mean of grinding and mixing. All of these components together lead to colors and types and affordability that we would not have gotten without those

materials technologies. Um of course you also have some safety issues here, and they're related to this. Uh. Many paint pigments are and always have been made from ground metals or metallic salts. We just talked a little bit about

that in a tex Stuff episode about fireworks. Actually. Um but uh, for example, lead used to be used to create white pigments until oh, I mean basically until everyone figured out how terrible of an idea lead is, um and and also began caring enough about their paint manufacturers to present alternatives like titanium dioxide or zinc oxide to create white paints. Yeah, that's a great point. Or what about something that I think is widely accepted in the

art world today, which is just photography. Yes, I mean one time this was brand new technology and it wasn't widely accepted at all all when it when it first came about it and became more popular than just a couple of people experimenting with chemical process to transfer light onto a physical film, which is you know, that's the process of photography, right, Sure, but it was considered kind of too real to be artistic, right, Yeah, it was.

It was considered that and the fact that it wasn't it was a mechanical and chemical process, not something that was hand crafted to create the image. So for anyone who has developed photos, you get your hands in that, that's true, but you you only move something from one chemical to another chemical until you're done. Uh. Now, the way that this all comes about is that you had this this drive during the Renaissance to create ever more realistic art so that you are representing what the human

eye can see as faithfully as you possibly can. Uh. This was something that kind of consumed a lot of artists. They all wanted to be the best at the representation of what is real, and we got into detail and perspective and all kinds of very intricate little line work and stuff like making sure proportions are accurate at the distance that you are at and that you are really capturing something as it is and not just some sort

of idealistic version of it. Well, photography, of course is kind of the the the ultimate approach to that, at least in a two dimensional format. And we talked plenty about three dimensional in our last episode, but in a two dimensional format, you know, capturing something by the light that is reflected off of the scene is about as close to what we the human Uh, the humans who are looking at it are going to get right. So

in that sense, it very much appealed to people. In fact, it started to become once the process became affordable, it became something that would replace other means of creating illustrations, wood cuttings, that kind of stuff, because that's expensive and time consuming to produce. Whereas if you are able to take a photograph, even if it takes an hour or two hours for you to be able to take a photograph,

that's still way faster than the artistic approach. So I can see how it would easily replace something like kind of the low rent portraiture you might get in or or even illustrations and say a publication. Sure, okay, but what about fine art? I mean, did it rival the kind of art that would be produced by a great painters? There there was a great resistance to it early on, and you had essentially three camps of thought. You had one that said it has no place in art whatsoever.

You had people who said, um, it could be really useful for artists because the artists could actually use the photograph as a reference point when making their own art. So in other words, it's just a step between a tool for creating real art. Yeah. So, so instead of having to have the painters stand out in the field in order to get the field just right, you just send a photographer out there to take a portrait picture of the field, and then the portraiture art sty just

or whatever the actually landscape I guess. Instead the landscape artist can just take a look at the picture as the reference point and make the painting that way. Uh. And then there was a third, very small group of people who said, you know, I I think photographs could be art all on their own. Um. And they were. They were shouted down pretty much early early on. It didn't take too long for people to really start making a serious push for proclaiming that art, that that photographs

can actually be considered art. Um. For example, there was Louis Figuier who said, back in eighteen fifty nine, until now, the artist has had the brush, the pencil, and the bureau, and now, in an addition, he has the photographic lens. The lens is an instrument like the pencil and die brush,

and photography is a process like engraving and drawing. For what makes an artist is not the process, but the feeling which I think sums up kind of my philosophy, the idea that if someone is using uh any kind of particular process to express some sort of thought or emotion, that is more what I think of as art than

whatever the actual process was. Well, yeah, I don't even know exactly which one he meant in the original quote, But there's another way of looking that at that, which is that it's about the feeling it creates in the audience or the viewer more than how it was created.

Although there was some argument at the time that since it was a mechanical process that it was almost like if a like if a textile mill was creating a very beautiful weaving that was still somehow cold and mechanical in nature because it was created by a machine and not a person. Right. It was it was manufactured as

opposed to create it artistically. And I would put in at this point that, um, one of my angry Lauren moments was when the switchover from film to digital photography occurred, and I was like, well, a digital photograph is never going to look as warm and beautiful as a film photo aograph because it's just it's missing that quality. Oh you know, I was actually with you there. I I have a soft spot for film. I like film. I

like film in films too. So in other words, yeah, and we see this, like even from just a consumer perspective, we see consumers who might resist a digital movie as opposed to a movie that was shot and projected on film. Although you're really going to have to struggle to find real film projectors of this day though I do it. I mean, like, like we all in this room, you know, having been born into a time when Stanley Kubrick or Ansel Adams or any of the other kind of visionaries

of filming mediums have have already been doing work. George Lucas. We of course, we all accept this as being art and perhaps I mean most definitely even fine art. But I can I can see where previous generations would have been resistant to it. Yeah, so we accept photography now. But what's the next thing, I mean, what's going on now?

We we talked in another podcast about three D printing in the art world, but I think we should talk more about this world we're creating where art, science, technology and design are very much merging. There the lines between them are blurring in a lot of instances, and I think this is actually a really cool thing. I don't think it's art being deluded. I mean, obviously there's still people who make sculptures and paintings in a traditional way.

Today I really like the way that technology and art and science and design are becoming this strange other category of creation. I don't even know what you call it, but well, I mean they're there. I think of it in some ways that you can think of you know, art, design, technology, science, you can think of that all of these things are part of what is humanity, right, These are all aspects

of humanity, and there's overlap in different categories. There's some art that overlaps with technology or science, components of a larger call chair. Yeah, so you can't. I mean, I wouldn't say that any one piece was necessarily uh an example of pure art or pure technology. There are always going to be some other elements of these other parts of what it is to be human that spill over into that. You see that at some really big events like the Burning Man Festival or maker fares, where you

have these examples of things. Some of them are practical, some of them are not practical, Some of them are meant for entertainments. Some of them are meant for performance, some of them are just meant to make you think or feel something. And you might look at any two exhibits or or examples of stuff that people have created at one of these events and have very different reactions. And one you might have just a purely intellectual reaction of that is really interesting and I wonder how they

did it. Another one might affect you emotionally, And they're going to fall on different scales for each person about whether or not it feels like it's art or maybe just art informed the creation of that piece. But I think that to say one is art and one is not art in some sort of weird um you know, subjective definition is not terribly helpful. Well yeah, I mean there's there's very little about art that is absolutely objective. So this also reminds me of a particular byproduct of

technology that can be a form of art. Some artists create these very beautiful stones, stones kind of in quotation marks. They're called Fordite or Detroit agget and there I know, right like Texas gold. Um, they're they're they're they're created from from layers upon layers of automotive paint that have

been reclaimed from factories. It also reminds me of I used to have here at the office a little piece of um what looked like obsidian glass, and it was actually a piece of of waste from a plasma waste converter. Oh wow, because their plasma waste converters can create two different types of waste. One of them is a gas which can be used to create sin gas, which you can then use as a fuel. And the other is this this uh, non organic molten mass that when it cools,

looks like volcanic rock. And I could easily imagine using that to create an artistic uh you know, expression of some sort some kind of sculpture or whatever. If you wanted to, you could actually use that, and that would be an interesting artistic expression. To say. Ultimately, the material that I used to create this came from a landfill, Like literally, the landfill provided the raw material that I used to make this sculpture. And it doesn't it doesn't

look necessarily like that. And of course there are artists who use Yeah, I mean that's a there's a grand tradition of using reclaimed objects to to make into pieces of art. Sure, I want to talk about something that Jonathan, I think you actually have written a good deal about the path, which is a really interesting project. In my mind, it's called the Avatar Machine. This is a fun one.

So the Avatar Machine was this project that the goal of the project was to find out what it would be like to view yourself from the third person perspective, as if you were playing a h an MMO like World of Warcraft, but you were the character and everything you did was translated in real time to the view you had, but you had to have a view of yourself as a third person character. Now, typically in those MMOs, your view is a third person view where you're behind

and slightly above the character. So it's like you're about, you know, two or three feet over the character's head and behind the character, so that you get a good view of what is in front of and a little bit to either side of that character. So how do you manage that if you wanted to make a you know,

a real life version. Well, if you're Mark Owens, what you do is you build a harn and the harness holds a camera that is mounted about two ft above and behind the person who's wearing the suit, and then the feed from the camera goes directly into a monitor that's inside a helmet, and when you wear the helmet, your vision is blocked except for what is on the monitor, so you can only see the view from the monitor.

You can't see the world around you otherwise. So with a live video feed coming from the camera, you see yourself from the third person. You see as if your view is hovering above and behind yourself. And then you try and wander around and this artistic uh experiment, you might say, yeah, it's see it's hard to know even what to call it. It was it was definitely uh.

You know. Mark Owens is pretty well known for experimenting with different kinds of technology and art, but this particular one, he was exploring how people behave when they are viewing themselves from the third person. Do their sense of ethics change? Do they do they feel still? Do they still feel as connected to their actions? Have responsibility for your behavior? Right?

If you walked up to, say, a small child, and pushed over the small child, uh, wearing this avatar machine, would you actually feel like you know, well, from experience, I'm just saying from what i've the videos I view, not that I saw a video of Marco once pushing over a small child. But that's just what Jonathan would do if you were away. He specifically said that it

kind of creates a sense of detachment. And also, he said the other thing was that because the the the costume he made, because he didn't just do a simple, you know, boring helmet and a harness. He made a full costume for this thing. And the costume included, uh, these these spikes on the helmet that looks like a spiky hair, and the costume included like these kind of big shoulder pads and stuff, so that made you look like a big, old, brawny character from World of Warcraft.

He said that people who would wear it would invariably start swinging their arms wide and kind of adding swagger to their their walks, so that they're essentially adopting the kind of walk you would see in one of these games. It's like they became, uh, a different different entity than that they would if they were just walking around as themselves.

If I put that on, what I tried to do is like keep glitching until I'm a hundred feet in the air and I'm stuck there right or you like you take take one wrong step on a on a staircase and suddenly fly five feet straight up in the sky. Yeah, that that fortunately did not happen. If you want to see what this looks like, there's a video of it on the on the moment side actually eas even modern arts, So if you just google like MoMA avatar machine, you

can find this video. Yeah, it's pretty cool. But the thing that I was really interested in in the video it was it was actually kind of weird to talk about, but it was this idea of devices that were designed to harm themselves, the suicide machines. I found these things very strangely sad and beautiful. Actually they're very dynamic, but very upsetting. Yeah, so I don't know what to call them. Again,

it's obviously a work of art. It's their machines. They're working machines with motors um and what the machines do is kill themselves. So there is it's referred to as sort of a kind of industrial art. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing this right, but I think it's tious. Riker

and this artist created these machines. So there's one of them that has an arm that is operated by a motor and The arm is attached to five saw blades which slowly worked back and forth on the outside of the gearbox, working their way down into the gearbox that eventually would end up sawing into itself to the point where right there's another one that went and turned on, begins to pour sand into its own gearbox, and as the sand builds up, that provides resistance against the gears

until the machine finally stops working. Uh. They literally are suicide machines. They perform no function except self destruction. And there is something really profound I found about watching these videos. Again, you can go look them up if you just google them. They they had an effect on me like a like a good piece of artwood. But what do you call them? There? Their machines there there you view them through video because I guess eventually they wouldn't work anymore. It's really only

a one time sort of installation. It's a great trick, but you can only do it once. Well. It actually reminds me a little bit of a device that the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon built called the ultimate machine. Have you ever seen the Ultimate machine? I don't think so.

Here's what the ultimate machine is imagine that you have a little box, and the box has a little trap door in it, and it also has a little switch, and whenever you flip the switch, the trap door opens and a hand comes out and pushes the switch to the off position and then retreats back into the box and the trap door closes, and that is all the machine does. So if you try to turn the machine on, it turns itself back off, over and over and over again.

Now Claude Shannon brilliant man, founder of information theory, he's the reason why we have the computers working the way they do from a theoretical perspective, and he also just really loved to build weird stuff. People have gone on to make other versions of the Ultimate Machine that do other things that one of my favorites has it where if you if you hit the switch enough times, the trap door comes up and a little white flag comes up out of the trap door and it surrenders and

then it finally turns the switchback off again. So it's it's one of those things where again it's in that case the purposes for amusement, right, The only thing there is for you to really get a laugh out of this experience, but it is that that you do have that emotional response. You might not call that fine art, but it's certainly is technology that evokes an emotional reaction. Oh well, I wouldn't want to necessarily write something off and say it's not art just because the emotion it

produces is humor and absurdity. Like we were talking about Duchamp earlier. How about a mona Lisa with mustache. I mean some people would look at that and say this actually meant something at the time it was produced. Or a telephone in the shape of a lobster. Yeah, um, I mean there is something joyful and absurd about it. Maybe some people might say, oh, you know, that's just kind of a goof, but I don't know, I like

a good goof. I can see that as art. So how about this next one then on the list, because I think that fits right in. I want you to imagine yourself in a scenario. Okay, so you're you're yeah, no, I'm going to describe it. Wandering around in a lonely bus station late at night. I just your regular Wednesday night, and you come around a corner and suddenly you're staring at a large black ball hovering in front of your face and making noises at you. Okay, every other Wednesday night.

The noises might be the sound of echoing footsteps, little voices talking far away in the distance. You're specifically describing a nightmare, um like this is. This could easily be in any ghost movie you know. This is actually also a work of technology, art and design blurring together. It's called space Replay. You can google this also to see videos of it. It was a project created by Francesco Tacchini,

jew linka Ebhard, and will Yates Johnson. It is a three foot wide black balloon and the balloon material is a nylon and it floats. It's filled with a mixture of oxygen helium to the point where it achieves neutral buoyancy, so it doesn't go up or down really, it just

kind of hovers, uh. And of course, like obviously if there's wind gusts or something, it'll just follow them around and inside or electronic components that record ambient noise and then play it back on a delay, So the effect you get is a hovering black ball that plays a delayed tape loop of the ambient sounds of existence. So essentially what you could end up hearing is walking through say subway tunnel or like a tunnel that leads to

the subway station. Um, and this black orb is floating in there, and you're the only person there, and meanwhile you're hearing little children laughing, and then you never go to sleep again exactly because there were some kids in there just a minute ago and it recorded them. Yeah. I think this is this is great. I love it. It's not emotionally affecting necessarily, but I think it's just brilliantly absurd and really interesting. I I would call that

very emotionally affecting. If I ran into that thing, I would be emotionally affect well. To see the terry yourself. Look up the videos. It's called space replay. Yeah. I actually did watch one of the videos. Now, the videos mostly show people being you know, very nonchalant as they walked by this thing. Uh, as opposed to me would be like what the hell is that? So uh yeah, but it is a really interesting example. Another one that I wanted to talk about. It is actually a full exhibition.

It wasn't just one piece of art. All the different pieces of art in this I found really interesting. The exhibition was called trace recordings, surveillance and identity in the twenty first century. And it was an exhibit at UTS Gallery in Australia, and it was all about surveillance and

incorporating elements of surveillance into the art itself. Now, some of the more traditional pieces of art, like there was a photograph of an n s A listening station in the middle of this area that in the United States is off limits for radio broadcast because it's meant to allow radio telescopes to operate without interference, and the n s A is there to listen to stuff that bounces off the moon, and so it's just a photograph of that place and just kind of a reminder of you know,

this is interesting that they're listening to signals. But beyond that were some really cool examples, like a Paolo Cirios street Ghosts, which took pictures of people that that showed up on Google street View, printed out the pictures in real life size, and then posted them in the physical

locations where they had appeared on street View. So you'll see like these tunnels where people had been walking by on a tunnel and and their pictures have been pasted up and uh, exactly where they had been in the in the Google street View photo. There's another one, Benjamin Gallon's two point four Gig Hurts, which was an art

exhibit that consisted of a portable monitor and antenna. You could walk around with this thing through the streets of Australia and pick up unsecured CCTV cameras, so you could actually see live video feeds from cameras that had not been placed under any kind of of lockdown of security. And again it was just to kind of give you this,

this whole idea of surveillance and what it means. You know, I can't really say what the artist intended, obviously that that belongs to the artist, but it certainly certainly raised awareness of how much surveillance there is and how little of it is controlled. There was another one called Stranger Visions by Heather Dewey Hagborg, and it featured three D printed portraits quote based on genetic material taken from public places into quote like a bench, you know, or something.

You take some genetic material, you figure out what the person would probably look like, and then you print out a three dimensional face and mounted on the wall. And it's not at all creepy. I I for the record to think that that one was um more art than science. I I don't think that you can actually get create what someone's faces just based on care or I don't

know you can. You might be able to, you might be able to guess, you might be able to guess certain things like certain general demographics, but beyond that, I doubt that you could get to You wouldn't be able to get any any specifics um but it would be really general. And so there are a lot of artistic license there. But then then there was also a memory, which was a digital frame that included a camera inside

of it. The camera would take images of the people looking at the portrait and then incorporate their faces into an amalgamation of all the faces that had ever seen, so so the more people who saw it, the more generic the face would become. There was also one called descriptive camera, which might be my favorite one, which was

by Matt Richardson. So this is a camera that when you took a picture of something, it would give you a little print out receipt that described what it was that you took a picture of rather than a picture. So like let's say I've got a camera and I pointed at you, Joe, right now, and I take a picture.

After a couple of minutes, I would get a printed receipt that would say there's a man sitting in front of a microphone with headphones on, and maybe may might go into more detail, like tell me what color shirt you're wearing or what color eyes you have. The way this actually worked was that it did capture an image, but it would upload that to a web service that

used humans to analyze stuff. And the fun because then the humans have to describe what they see and then send it back and then you get a print out of what was seen. So imagine what what the the picture you would get would be through the eye of the analyst. So it wouldn't necessarily be a perfect representation of what you point the camera at. It would be the way someone would communicate that the best way they knew how, and the most accurate way they knew how.

So it could be really interesting to see in a way, you can kind of see how this other person views the world based on the pictures you took. And of course you can't guarantee that's always going to the same analysts, so you can't even really get a full grip that this one person sees the world in a very specific way based upon the descriptions that come back. But I thought that was a really cool idea. Uh. Some of my favorite things that I've seen are interactive art installations

that have played with the concept of the cloud. Um there there's one that's just really kitchy. That's a that's a motion based fun or cloud. It takes any motion from inside the room and and and integrates that that data into what it's how it's flashing and making noise. But but but a but a bigger one. There is a sculptural piece with these lighting and motor elements called the Capacitor by one John Grade that that moves and brightens and dims I mean, and this is a huge thing,

like like giant room size that you can walk around inside. Um. But but all of its movement and lights are based on a mix of historical weather data and live input from sensors on the roof of the Color Art Center in Wisconsin where it's installed. And the more that the current data differs from the historical data, the greater the shifts in movement and light as you're walking through the

installation that's pretty awesome. And then you know, you again with the maker fair stuff where I said that art informs design, which informs technology, and all of these things have this kind of uh symbiotic relationship with each other that's also in in all display for things like like products. You know, the design of products incorporate aesthetics. And you might argue, all right, so like sir Johnny I've who

who does design at Apple? You know, you would say that Apple is one of those companies that really has a great grasp on the concept of design. You might say that sir Johnny I've is an artist. Uh. Now, you might argue that the art that he creates are the the actual designs that all the products are based off of, and not the products themselves. I don't have a problem with that necessarily, but you definitely have to say that art at least informs the decisions. That's part

of the reason why Apple products have such a strong appeal. UH. And design in the Apple sense incorporates more than just the physical appearance of one of their products. It also incorporates how it works. So the actual the actual uh interface and how that interacts with the user is all part of that design, and again it all comes back to certain con steps that are very fundamental in creating art. Oh yeah, you could certainly say the same for the

teams that design, especially high end cars. They're I mean, they're gorgeous, but they're very functional. And then there's the video game debate, like video games they are. We don't have time to get into that today. We got a whole separate episode, certainly, although I do want to put in that the Museum of Modern Art has been collecting video game pieces um and displaying them over the past few years, so that I'd say that makes it a

little bit official. I think we all agree that Frankenstein through the Guys the Monster is fine art and Tim Curry's performance needs to be preserved forever. I would say all of the cut scenes in the whole Command and Conquer series are fine, fine art that also involves Tim Curry. Curry, I think, I think is what we're saying. Tim Curry himself is fine art. Yes he is. Uh, Mr Curry, we salute you. Okay, So I have another place I

want to go with this. Robots, not Tim Curry. I was going to say, and more rob Okay, Well, let's talk about robots. Um. So, first of all, they've been used in an artistic installations. Uh. There's one made by a shaung Juan who opened an art installation in Shanghai back in two thousand and twelve that had a couple of robotic or animatronic figures. Robotic might be a little might be a little generous. I would consider more animatronic

than robotic. But they were both uh, mechanical versions of Confucius. One of them was a full figure of Confucius that was inside a cage that would thrash around wildly. Uh, and live monkeys were also in the cage. So I'm

sure that was an interesting experience. Yeah, I mean it's if you watch video of this, it's very like it's pretty violent kind of thrashing, and it was supposed to sort of, at least from what the interpretations I've heard, it's supposed to kind of give an indication of the state of China and uh, and especially how it pertained a spirituality. But then there was also an incredibly huge Confucius that was sitting in a a large pool that

was essentially like a bathtub. So just think of a Confucius that's maybe I don't know, two and a half stories tall, but you only see him from the chest up, sitting in this pool as if it's a bath, and he was snoring. That was the other robotic. Then there's Jordan Wilson's robotic female dancer might be the creepiest thing in the world. I I still can't they my my best description. If you have not seen this video, I cannot necessarily recommend watching it because it will haunt your

waking dreams forever. Um. But but it sort of reminds me of like a like a broken model of a BioShock character. If it was dancing really hard. I like that you're trying to do the dance while you're talking microphone. That's a that's for the benefit of everyone who's watching us right now. To be fair, I get the sense that it wasn't It's not like it was supposed to be real cute and friendly. I think that there is something sinister being communicated. So in order to describe this,

let's let's let's explain what this is. So you've got a female figure, life sized female figure dressed in a white outfit that you would normally consider to be a kind of a sexy oltfit sex lady outfit. Yeah. She, the the robotic figure has has a realistic looking skin that is smudged in quite a few places. Um, and is wearing a long gloves as well as this this

sexy little outfit. Uh. She's also wearing a mask that covers the upper half of her face, has a long, deformed nose and is kind of green and bumpy slash scaly looking, so very very very monstrous. Yeah, deformed looking and uh. And the she dances two songs that have been purposefully distorted like blurred lines was one of the songs. In fact, that was the one that was playing in the video, which is already disturbing enough. And it was

hard to tell what the song was at first. It takes a while before the lyrics start kicking in you start realizing what song this is, and you know, again, I don't wish to project my own, uh, my own opinions upon the artist's intention, but the feeling I got was that this was kind of a commentary on sexualization

in general, and it was. I mean, it's really disturbing you start looking at because the motions are very they look very lifelike, but the appearance is grotesque, and the the distorted music adds to it, as well as the fact that the robot is lips singing along with some of the songs and also appears to look at people as they get closer and there, and the gaze from the robot will remain on that person a person around

it around. So if you start moving, the robot is dancing facing a mirror and actually is being supported by a pole. Come through the mirror into the robots torso. But if you were to pass back and forth within the view of the robot, it would track you if you were close enough. Very very unnerving. Um effective piece of art. I think, well, now that we've discussed some horrifying things, um well, let's talk about something delightful, like robots that make art. Yeah, I think some of these

things are really neat. A lot of them are robots that can follow specific rules to recreate something. For example, there are robots that can use cameras to look at a person and then sketch that person because the cameras can define where the edges of that person are, and then the robot arm kind of traces through that. But uh, you know again, it's following specific rules that a human

has set up an algorithm. Right. Uh. There are other robots that can do things like carve using chainsaws, carve into wood, and make a sculpture, but again following a specific pattern set by um an artist. This is kind of like our three D printer discussion, except of course this would be subtractive rather than additive, right, you know, but it is following a specific program to make contours and cuts in such a way that you get the

shape you want at the end of it. Although I would put in that just because you're creating a program that creates a piece of art, that doesn't mean that the outcome is not a piece of art, or or I don't know, maybe you would want to call the program the art rather than the end results. I just think my point is not so much whether or not the final product is art, but whether or not you call the robot an artist. I would say you don't, because the robot is following the directions of the actual

artist whoever set it up. It's a it's a tool ship. So but but what if you create a robot that creates robots that make art, then is the robot that created the robot the artist. The person who created the robot that created the robot artist is still the artist. I would say, until you get to a point where

the the I think you're a bio chauvinist. No, no, no, When you get to a point where a robot can create something undirected by a person, uh, you know, in order for it to be whatever it might be, Uh, then I would say that would be the robot would be an artist. But if the robot ultimately is directed by a person to do whatever it is it's needing to do, then I don't know that you can call

it an artist. Well okay, but I would just say that's sort of an issue of degrees really rather than a clear break, right, because you're just talking about increasing levels of complexity and abstraction between the original programming and the final result. Right. Like, you can have robots today, probably that create or not. Probably, I've seen it happen.

There are robots today that create works of art algorithmically, like that they're not told exactly what to create, except that the algorithm creates the set of rules that the robot has to behave in order to create the art exactly right, the butt cannot here. Here's how I would define it. Because the robot is incapable of breaking those rules,

the robot cannot be an artist. An artist can break the rules, doesn't necessarily have to break the rules, but an artist has to be able to break the rules. In my mind, to be an artist sounds like you're incorporating the idea of free will and a little a little bit. Okay, okay, that's interesting. I have I have a favorite quote from Ray kurtzwild kind of on this topic. He said in his book The Age of Intelligent Machines, the role of the computer is not to displace human creativity,

but rather to amplify it. It is a tool like a paintbrush, but one of unique and virtually unlimited potential. Clearly, the great artists of old must have had many ideas beyond the ones that they had time to actually express. By reducing the many chores involved, computers can give artists the opportunity to realize more of their artistic visions. See. I like this idea because it's the idea that technology

somehow makes us live lives of leisure. And we've all experienced the fact that despite the fact we have the Internet, computers, printers, we find ways to fill up those hours with more work so that we have it suddenly magically, you know, because that was one of those promises, right, the idea that when we create this technology, well I'll be able to sit around wearing jumpsuits and eating replicators for it,

do not have to worry about working. Are eight hours of work will be compressed into fifteen minutes and then you've got the rest of the time to do whatever you want. And and that just unfortunately hasn't proven true. Uh. And we we have a little thing here about what is the future of art? What's it gonna look like? And I would argue that art is always a product of the time and culture that it comes from, not necessarily a product to the point where you can trace

it directly, but you know, artists come from somewhere. Artists come from that time and culture that that was around when they started getting the inspiration to create whatever it

was they were going to create. And because we can't really predict what the future culture and times are going to be like, we can't even possibly imagine what art is going to be like, I would say that technology will continue to play an important role in art, and we may see an increasing direct involvement of technology inside art, not just producing it. Sure right, I'm you know, given that that art is a reaction to the culture and that it creates reactions within the culture, It's it's a

cyclical thing. It's definitely not separate. And you know, nor would nor would I want to try to separate it, so you wouldn't. This is what I have to say to that angry Joe from ages ago about how we should stick with the tried and true methods. I mean that ultimately you can see lots of skill and lots of interpretation and lots of expression that way, but you're

also limiting expression that way. There could be artists out there who could thrive with tools that are well beyond what the traditional artists might use, that could end up affecting us deeply on an emotional level, that that otherwise would be unable to express themselves because the tools they want to use are considered verboten in the world of arts.

With the capital A and I have a follow up question from our Duch Schamp discussion at the beginning of this episode, and this is the question I have for you, guys, what do you think do you think now that we're in the era of digital digital video and digital photography and we're getting further and further away from film and film is always, you know, like motion picture, film is a series of pictures that, when played together very very quickly,

produces the illusion of movement. Right. Do you think the further we get away from film being that pervasive medium, the less people will be able to identify with du Schamp's nude descending a staircase number two, because now we don't kids today? Yeah, but Teddy Roosevelt never had the experience of watching a show on Netflix glitch up and

freeze in the middle of several consecutive frames. Right, But he also probably never saw that many films that I'm just saying that if he had seen that, I think the kids of tomorrow, unless Netflix gets its act together, will be just fine. I'm blaming it all on you, Netflix. No, I think digital video is really going to It makes me think of how Quentin tarantino um talks about digital

film he prefers or digital video. He much prefers actual physical film to digital video because he thinks of that as the series of photographs that create the illusion of movement. I mean, maybe I don't understand how digital video works. I thought that was the same thing. Not at all. No, you know what, It's okay, Joe, I'll tell you all about it in a great episode of Tech Stuff, another podcast series you guys should be listening to if you

don't already. But since that, because well, beyond the parameters of this discussion here, I'm going to open up the question to our listeners, what do you guys think? Do you think that things like the technological advancement can mean that we might be distanced from the original vision of artists to the point where a piece of art that once had no meaning because the technology was too new, then had a meeting meaning because the technology became more familiar.

Could it in fact lose its meaning over time again as we go beyond that technology. That's an interesting question. It's a fun question. Another question, Hey, have you guys created any art that has been dependent upon technology that you would like to share with us? Because if you have, I totally want to see it. Yeah, and you should definitely share that on our Facebook page. You can also contact us on Twitter or Google Plus. That would be another great place to share your art. Are handled all

three of those is FW thinking. So come on be part of the audience that lets us know exactly what you want and share your work with us because we're really interested to see what you've come up with, and uh, we'll talk to you again, really sim For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,